1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus, an image forming method, a computer program, and a computer-readable storage medium. In particular, the present invention relates to a technique suitable for image forming data content delivered via digital broadcasting or data communications, including communications over the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data content written in markup languages, such as an extensible hypertext markup language (XHTML), is interpreted and printed using computers capable of handling large-scale resources. Since such usage is intended to display the content on display units, only a limited area to be displayed is required to be processed, and therefore temporary rendering is repeated.
For a printing system, unlike a display system described above, batch processing in which the overall content is interpreted and then distributed to each page enhances the processing more efficiently in the entire system.
Digital televisions, digital cameras, cellular phones, and the like, have been increasingly using data content written in markup languages. Since these devices have only limited resources (functional capabilities), there is a demand for avoiding a relayout process occurring in the process of conversion of the content to printing data.
Conventional techniques propose that at the time when a formatter formats a structured document in accordance with style data, position information regarding the structured document be conveyed to an additional-information producing unit. The additional-information producing unit associates the position information with each element of the structured document. The associated information and document type are superimposed as additional information on a document image by an additional-information superimposing unit. The document image is then printed by a printing unit. However, the above problem remains unsolved.